My mother passed away at 6:15 this morning, after a long battle with ovarian cancer. May she rest in peace. We will miss her presence in body; she will always be present in our hearts. (I will get a better photo posted soon.)
A friend asked me what I generally cook for Thanksgiving dinner, and it was too complicated to do a Facebook reply, so here’ my typical menu.
Roast Turkey - I follow the Joy of Cooking method, which is quite similar to this recipe:
http://www.cookingnook.com/roast-turkey-recipe.html
Stuffing - my mother’s recipe is like this one they call “bread celery” stuffing:
http://recipes.suite101.com/article.cfm/how_to_make_three_different_turkey_stuffings
Gravy - A basic, no-frills variety, similar to this recipe, though I may add a few mushrooms:
http://www.ehow.com/how_6982_make-turkey-gravy.html
Cranberry Sauce - I hate to admit it, but I use the whole cranberry sauce from a can, that turns out kind of like this:
http://www.cooksrecipes.com/sauce/homemade_whole_cranberry_sauce_recipe.html
Classic mashed potatoes - that’s an easy one:
http://www.cookingnook.com/mashed-potatoes-recipe.html
Also, what I discovered are called “American Fried Yams”, but I use brown sugar instead:
http://www.cdkitchen.com/recipes/recs/319/American-Fried-Yams84680.shtml
Then there’s the question of vegetables. I hear brussels sprouts are traditional, but I detest them, so I do other things.
Dressed-up green beans:
http://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/browse-all-recipes/green-beans-almond-lemon-brown-butter-10000001609295/
Green peas were always on the table of my childhood home. I can’t help myself - I don’t really dress them up, and I only have a spoonful but I can’t seem to pass by the aisle of canned veggies without tossing a small can of peas into my shopping cart:
http://recipes.lovetoknow.com/wiki/Canned_Peas_Recipe
Depending on how many people I’m cooking for, I may supplement the green beans with a simple tossed green salad, which I have to explain here. My friend, Sharon, taught me tht the key is how the salad is tossed. To get the right result, use very fresh lettuce (I prefer Boston or curly leaf) and a bit of basic or green onion. Toss the ingredients with a bit of good olive oil for 20 times, then add a bit of salt and an acid (lemon juice or balsamic vinegar) and toss again for 20 times. The 20 tosses are important!
Then, dessert. Pumpkin pie, of course. I cheat and buy one, then top it with real whipped cream, made fresh.
I like to do fruit, as well. This year, I’ve bought a fresh pineapple that promises to be splendid. Other years, it’s berries or a bake pear dessert.
And that’s the whole story. Tomorrow, photos of my holiday table.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what draws me to people or keeps me at arms’ length. and marvel at my good fortune to have been drawn to such good folks. Maybe it’s that I’ve spent the last couple of days with relatively new friends. It’s been a wonderful discovery period, as my previous connection had been a real-life introduction at a conference, and continued contact with one of this lovely couple through Facebook, the result of a shared passion for Scrabble. Now, having met both of them and spending time ensconced in their guest room, I am grateful for the opportunity to have gotten to know them (and their pets), and look forward to reciprocal visits. It’s nice to be around two women so obviously happy, and so delighting in each other’s love and affection, as well. Their warmth radiates out to anyone in their immediate vicinity.
Another couple, local to me, are folks I’ve just gotten to know better. Introduced to them by fluke through an American colleague who since moved back to the us, they started out as business contacts, and are now entrenched as good friends. Recently, I had the opportunity to do a good deed, and house sat / horse sat for them. Seeing them each day as they came by to do horse care, going out for the odd meal together, and interacting with them in small ways - for example, they brought over a modem so I could have internet access - gave me a glimpse into their innate goodness. Again, a couple who show their warmth and emotional depth with each other and those in their circles, whether it be with their horses or their friends.
Another is a long-time friend who renewed her friendship after a many-year hiatus. I’ve always admired her maturity and groundedness, and am extremely grateful to have her in my life. And of course, my best friend, who can finish my paragraph before I’ve completed the first sentence, and has insights into “problematic” relationships, because of her counselling background, and shares insights that it would have taken me years to figure out on my own. These are just a few of the people I’m blessed to have in my life, and the ones that have recently come to the fore to show me support and love.
I could talk about what keeps me at arms’ length from others, but there is no sense is bringing that negativity to this post. Suffice to say that interactions during difficult times have a way of speaking volumes. To those of my friends who have made me feel special during what could have been a far more difficult time, I am eternally grateful.
The camping equipment is getting unpacked - I’m going camping for the first time in ages. What it took to get me out of my complacency was some enthusiastic lobbying by my grandkids. Photos will be on Facebook. It should be fun; there’s nothing like bonding with these two lovely souls over nights under the stars. Follow-up: We went pseudo-camping, as in: slept inside, but had the basics of camping (well, I had my computer, too). Swimming at the lake, picking wild blackberries (with which I made blackberry sauce for pancakes), dogs, cats, horses, and a llama, and lots of fresh air in the country. The smile shows, as my grandkids say goodbye, they’ve had a good time.
Going blueberry picking with my honourary grandchildren (and their mom, of course). Love this time of year - fresh berries and spending quality time with the kids. I like that they learn about growing food (it doesn’t come from the grocery store shelf) in a fun and tasty way.
Here’s a terrible and amateurish site to find u-pick places. (It’s worth looking at, just for the nostalgia factor.)
From hereon in, sticking to safe topics. Love my Fluevogs:
http://www.fluevog.com/code/?pp=4&view=detail&p=92&colourID=2263
http://www.fluevog.com/code/?pp=2&view=detail&p=39&colourID=2033
And here’s John Fluevog himself:
My great grandmother used to sit in front of the television watching the news with a look of intense concentration, though I never knew if it was because of the subject matter or because she had difficulty understanding the language. Anna was the matriarch of my mother’s side of the family. With her children, she had come to Canada from the Old Country, long after her husband had died and left her to fend for herself. She took turns living with her son — my grandfather, and her daughter in Saskatchewan, but spent most of her years living with my grandparents. She never worked outside the home but made as much of a contribution as everyone else to the running of the household.
I never ascertained what kind of formal education Anna had, though I suspect it was very basic. She could write Slovak, and she would let me trace over her handwriting, copying those mysterious looking shapes that I have come to recognize as penmanship typical of eastern Europeans. Even Anna’s attempts at writing English transliterated into Slovak bore her special hieroglyphics. She would try to teach me to enunciate the Slavic sounds, in words that sounded like dziwka, tcheck-i, znash.
Anna learned English by reading the Bible. Wherever an important passage appeared, she would mark the beginning and the end with a large, pencilled circle. Her entire Bible was circled in this way. Anna wore out more than one copy of the Bible, the already thin pages getting thinner and greyer until the fibres would give way and the words on one side of the page became inextricably linked with those on the back. My great grandmother never read novels or magazines or even the newspaper, for that matter. Reading was an activity reserved for religious publications, which she read from cover to cover every week. To keep up with world events, my great grandmother watched the news.
Anna watched the news every day, but only the six o’clock news. She loved Walter Cronkite. I knew there was something unseemly, something almost indecent, with the way my great grandmother carried on about Walter Cronkite, and not just in the way she talked to him. She talked to just about everyone on television. Sometimes she railed and shook her fists, daring the performers or announcers to answer back. The fact that they never responded didn’t seem to phase my great grandmother. To her, television was like having a personal stage production. The audience is allowed to heckle but the actors’ jobs are to keep the show going, not to respond to the audience.
But my great grandmother knew, as well as she knew the sky was blue, that the people on the television screen could see into her living room. Randomly, she would tell me, “Pull your dress down over your knees. They can see up your skirt.” I would dutifully untangle my frame from whatever sprawled-out position I had adopted, and modestly pull my skirt down as far as it would go, even as I would mutter, “No, they can’t.”
Walter Cronkite’s refusal to talk to my great grandmother bothered her, though. Anna offered him her advice, asked him angry, rhetorical questions, and chided him any time he reported an item from a particularly stupid viewpoint. And when Walter Cronkite signed off with, “Goodnight,” my great grandmother would always answer in kind before she turned off the television.
Watching the news with my great grandmother was boring for me since the stern looks of the announcers could not bring even the most light-hearted news story to life. Watching wrestling with my great grandmother wasn’t much better. My mother and my grandmother could never figure out what made my great grandmother tune in to watch men fling one other onto mats and pretend to stomp all over each other. Anna would point her finger and shout excitedly in Slovak words to the effect of, “that’s it,” and “let him have it.” My grandmother especially, being the gentle soul she was, would try to convince my great grandmother to turn off the television. My grandmother’s excuse was that I should not be exposed to such violent degeneracy, but Anna was stubborn. My mother and grandmother would eventually retreat to the kitchen, clucking and shaking their heads in embarrassed bewilderment while I remained in the living room, feeling privileged for my right to this entertainment, but actually finding more diversion in watching my great grandmother watch wrestling.
My favourite time to watch television with my great grandmother was during the afternoon. This was a treat possible only when I slept over at my grandparents’ house. We would watch soap operas over top of my great grandmother’s running commentary. Here the heckling would become serious as Anna would spit out her most scathing remarks at the television screen. “Look at her. Hussy. Look at all that stuff on her face. If I was her husband, I would make her wash it all off. How can she show her face on television?” What bothered my great grandmother most of all was to watch people kissing on television. She would contort her face into a grimace and look away from the screen, commanding me to do likewise. “Ah yoi,” she would utter in disgust, “look what they do. Germs, germs you get from doing such a thing.” Then she would wipe her mouth on the tissue she kept inside the cuff of her sleeve for just such occasions. Over time, I learned that the best strategy was to keep quiet. Any attempt to explain why the characters were kissing or, heaven forbid, to absolve them would result in a lecture about God, morals, and upbringing, invariably ending with, “I never kissed my husband on the mouth. Never.” But if I kept quiet, Anna’s curiosity would get the better of her and she had to peek at the screen to see what happened next, if someone needed chiding or if anyone tried to sneak in another mouth-to-mouth kiss as soon as she’d turned her back.
Every so often, my mother and her brother would try to explain the mechanics of television to my great grandmother. The entire family would be concentrated around the kitchen table. Diagrams would be drawn showing boxes representing television sets and wavy lines as transmission frequencies. Anna would be sitting in the middle, the thin white hair nodding up and down with her head as she indicated she understood.I would lose interest in the exercise soon enough, and would wander off to watch whatever television program was on, taking advantage of the fact that the level of concentration in the adjoining room distracted the adults from realizing I was tuned in to programs my mother normally would not allow me to watch.
Eventually the time would come when everyone would rise and mill around the kitchen, refilling their cups of tea. My uncle would stand, face reddened from his mission of enlightenment, and shake his head as if he’d finally taught a stubborn child the dangers of crossing the highway. From the next room, I would hear my great grandmother pull back her chair and call out to me in a clear voice, “Ah yoi, cover your knees. He can see up your skirt.”
Walter Cronkite was an important link to my greatgrandmother. I miss my greatgrandmother, and now I miss Walter Cronkite.
If you’re one of the few friends who hasn’t heard the news by now (after E announced it on Facebook!), I’ve separated from E, en route to divorce. I also sold my house, and am going to house sit for friends for a while, to get my bearings. I’ll be out of here by end of month. It’s the end of an era, for sure. Time for new adventures, and some self-care.
Friday morning started out as a stellar morning. I’d dropped 2 lbs the previous day. All Friday, I was so good. Ate carefully and consciously, drank lots of water, worked out (45 minutes of cardio plus 1 hour of weights). By the evening, I’d gained - yes, gained - 4.5 lbs. It was a devastating blow, and my immediate reaction is to be demoralized. I was hungry when I got home, and cooked a low-carb stir-fry. I also roasted an organic chicken, and had a chicken leg. Woke up this morning having gone down 1 of those 4.5 lbs and felt intense frustration. It’s a completely irrational reaction, to be sure. But that’s part of my unhealthy relationship to food. When I get frustrated, I’m less likely to restrain myself. (Is that called acting out? Re-acting out?)
I fell off the wagon a bit in the morning, having a croissant at breakfast. At the day-long meeting, they brought in muffins in the morning and sandwiches for lunch. (I took off the top piece of bread, and ate as much of the filling as I could without eating the bottom slice.) I made a point of having meat and salad late afternoon, and other than suffering terrible indigestion - I suspect from the vestiges of the bread mixing with the protein and salad, it kept me going. I also walked across downtown twice, from the university to the West End, and then back to the Skytrain station. Oh yes, I fell off the wagon at night, too, accepting an offered piece of an Australian chocolate-covered licorice stick, which I’d bought for E, as I knew it was a childhood favourite of hers.
Tomorrow will have to be a big work-out day, as Ineed to get myself back on track as soon as possible.
Had a drink with a friend who is moving back east today. Well, he had a drink and dessert; I had club soda, a calamari appie and a side salad. We commented that though the waiter treated us as a stereotypical couple, bringing a dessert and two spoons, there was nothing stereotypical about either of us - a straight 30-something guy and a gay 50-something woman hanging out. We also commented on a difference between men and women: he said that men think about sex every 3 seconds. I said that women think about food or looks every 3 seconds. Food because though women’s beauty products come in every “flavour” under the sun, we can put these substances on our bodies, but heaven forbid we actually put anything will flavour into our bodies. Being attractive, ergo, being thin, is put out there as an impossible ideal to be achieved, and it takes vigilance: is the hair good, the make-up good, nothing showing that shouldn’t be showing, skirt straight, legs arranged in a provocative but not too provocative way? And the food obsessions! How many calories is that? That looks really yummy, but if I have one of those, I’ll have to find something to give up, to keep the calorie count low. It’s insane.
OK, Food Diary, I tried very, very hard over the weekend to get back on track. I went for a workout on Saturday morning and then came home to get some client work done. Instead, got into an argument which left me feeling headachey and out of sorts. So napped, and then worked. I can’t even remember what I ate on Saturday. I just remember that I was feeling nauseous and chilled, before I napped, and worked till all hours to make up for my nap. Net effect: down 1 lb.
On Sunday, I had a low-carb wrap with protein, and went off to volunteer with the Feed the Hungry project, where Jews and Muslims get together at a Downtown East Side church to cook for, and serve, a couple of hundred homeless people. (Yeah, the irony of volunteering to handle food and not touch it isn’t lost on me. Had lovely conversations with a publisher and an architect, and ran food to tables. Oddly enough, I have no urge to eat when I’m around food all the time. Cooking is a sure-fire way to kill my appetite. But I did drink my litre of water before lunch.
Then, went to my first book club meeting, where we were scheduled to discuss Fall on Your Knees - only I turned up a week early, it seems. So I stayed for lunch - a take-off on huevor rancheros but with way more taco strips in it than I’d expected - and refamiliarized myself with the book. After that, a trip to the office to do some work with a colleague, and another litre of water. After dropping her off, stopped at the grocer near her to buy a package of matzahs - not for me, but to send to my penpal in Japan as a special request. I think that having the carbs at lunch made me headachey and hungry, so I grabbed a half-dozen non-coated chicken wings before heading home so I wouldn’t be ravenous later. Dinner was a bit of salad and low-carb meatloaf, and some tea, before finishing up a bunch of work. I didn’t think I did that badly during the day, but eating after 6 PM is always tricky. The net effect was: no weight loss (no gain, either). Disappointing, but I’m not going to let it get me down. Onward and upward.
Dear Food Diary,
Friday wasn’t such a good day for me. I had worked till the wee hours of the morning on Thursday, and started off Friday with a cup of tea and an early conference call, which is too early for business hours here, and too late for business hours in Germany; just the logistics of business. As soon as I finished that, I had two guys come to give me quotes on landscaping and building a fence for the back yard. I think that triggered a money-anxiety response, because I spent the rest of the day trying very hard to focus on work, but finding my mind wandering and thinking about, what else, food. It’s not like I wondered about cooking techniques or similar. I was fighting a primal urge to relieve the general feeling of anxiety, the knot in the pit of my stomach, by eating something. I know how the feeling goes. As I start to eat, I feel a calming, a let-down, start to happen. Instead, I made tea, I drank water, I updated Facebook and clicked on every Twitter link that came through. I would work and pace, and pace and work. I should have gone to the gym, and in fact was dressed for it, in the hopes that being prepared would make me more likely to “just pop out” and go for a work out. Instead, I was distracted and unfocused. I wrote letters to the strata office, asking for authorization to build a fence, upgrade windows, add a screen door, redirect the downspouts from our yard to points beyond. I prepared my granddaughter’s birthday gift, and wrote cheques to colleagues who needed to be paid for contract work. I made soup with organic chicken with veggies and quinoa instead of barley. I grit my teeth so hard that my jaw hurt. Yes, the anxiety had taken root. Coming from a poor background, there was never enough money. I really hate the feeling of being financially squeezed. Did I mention how much I hate the pressures of financial stress? I don’t know what I’d do if my business dropped off and I couldn’t earn money. Thank God it’s doing alright. I ate chicken soup with quinoa and veggies, and worked until the moment we had to walk out the door to my granddaughter’s dinner.
Ah yes, dinner. A group dinner. A group dinner with that whole social dynamic I just spent the previous day fighting with, and which I lost. My granddaughter chose Italian, and I asked for the calamari not to be breaded, to leave the croutons out of the salad, and drank club soda. But the bread, the never-ending hot bread with butter that was being cut into generous slices and passed around the table. I succumbed, several times, in fact, and though recovered by ordering chicken parmesan instead of a pasta dish, it was too late. The bread slices, the breading on the chicken, and the mozzarella in the main dish set me back. I didn’t even have cake - thanks to her dad having bought an ice cream cake, I was spared that hurdle - but the damage had been done. I may have tried to rationalize away the fall from the wagon as not counting, as it was a special occasion, but my body wasn`t buying it.
Net effect: up yet another 2 lbs and feeling horrible, not just because of the cumulative effects of eating wheat and dairy 3 days running, but not liking myself for my lack of restraint.
Dear Food Diary,
Yes, I tried. And didn’t do so well. And tried again. And didn’t do so well. And now I’m paying the price and am back on the wagon.
Thursday actually started out as a better day: Tea. Water. Lite matzah with cheese. (OK, so that wasn’t so great, but the matzah was “lite”!) More tea. More water. A half-cup of cabbage/beef/tomato sauce mixture. A half-cup frozen cherries, zipped with a splash of almond milk with the Bamix. A little later, sauteed a cup of mixed seafood and a quarter-cup of green beans before heading out to the gym. At the gym, I realized that the entire day, I’d been anxious. Don’t know where it came from - could have been the deadlines, the work stress, the home stress, a combination of all three - who knows, but by the time I had finished my cardio and was somewhere between the first and second set, all I wanted to do was cry. And not just a little cry, but a big, break-down-and-weep like there’s no tomorrow cry. Of course, a gym isn’t really the place to have a melt-down, and it would have freaked out my trainer completely. So with a little pep talk from him about centering and going to my happy place, I managed to soldier through the workout, figuring that I’d sit in the car later and let it all out. But then I finished my workout and realized that I needed to get back home for the strata council meeting, so didn’t have any time for me, to process my stuff and my feelings.
I headed home, and was intercepted by my neighbour, who was also heading to the council meeting. She reminded me that they were serving food before the meeting; it’s standard procedure. I followed her to the meeting, mentally willing myself to be strong and not touch the food. You can imagine how long that lasted. I helped get out the cutlery and so on, and sat down, but the isolation feeling started to happen, and I could sense that the teary feeling was threatening to well up and spill over. So I took a plate and got some food. As far as choices went, I did the best I could, but it was Canadian-Chinese food, all with starch-and-sugar-laden sauces, and breading and coatings. Despite ignoring the rice and noodles, I knew, even as I was selecting bits and pieces for my plate, that I was being counter-productive. I deluded myself into thinking that, though I wouldn’t lose any weight, I would simply stay the same weight for a day.
What makes it so hard for me to stay away from food in group settings? It goes back a long ways, and the scars run deep. When I was a kid, I was the one at school who stood in the hallway during the national anthem, and didn’t celebrate any - and I mean ANY - of the holidays. No Christmas, no Hallowe’en, no St. Patrick’s Day, no Valentine’s Day, no birthdays. I was made to separate myself from the other kids in the school, particularly around holiday celebrations. So would come the day of a classroom celebration, and I’m sitting in the back of the class, unable to join in while everyone else played games, sang songs, and enjoyed the inevitable feast that accumulated from the collective class contributions. Now, I was an awkward kid anyhow - artsy, geeky, and smart - but this added social distance perpetuated by my mother’s misguided Christian fundamentalist religion was a sure-fire way to malsocialize a child. And the other kids - well, it was in the 60s, in the country, and let’s just say that a lot of them didn’t come from the most sophisticated of stock - were allowed by the teachers to torment me well beyond my tolerance levels. Bullying wasn’t a taboo, as it is now, and the teachers really didn’t have a lot of interest or patience for an awkward kid of a whacky religion. So the torment went unchecked, and I spent the next three decades getting horridly triggered. Triggered by “don’t touch the food when everyone else can” compounded with “being the outsider amongst the insiders”. Hate it, hate it, hate it. And I have managed to shrug it off, mostly. I attended a friend’s birthday party a few weeks ago and managed to avoid everything but a some veggie sticks and a bottle of sparkling water, while everyone around me indulged in pastry-wrapped savory appetizers and chocolate desserts. But every so often, my vulnerability gets the better of me and I succumb. And what made me kick myself was that on Thursday, the food wasn’t even worth it!
Net effect: Up 2 lbs. and now beating up on myself for not being stronger. I know that white-knuckle dieting doesn’t work in the long run, but sometimes I just have to dig in and white-knuckle it to make it through the day.
Dear Food Diary,
Yesterday, I got up and put the final touches on materials for a meeting in the afternoon, dealt with some last-minute email and so on, then raced out of the house, realizing I was late for my first meeting of the day. I did have the presence of mind to have a cup of tea and a piece of low-carb bread with almond butter on it, but even as my heels were clacking down the sidewalk towards the car, I thought, “Shit, I’m doing it again. I’m leaving the house without preparing for a day of running around, and I’m going to end up hungry and dizzy and nauseous. So I devised a plan that would kind of keep me going throughout the day.
Meeting 1: Matcha soy latte, no syrup (unsweetened), with a half-packet of some stevia-based sweetener.
Pit stop: Office to pick up mail. A glass of water at the coffee bar while I waited.
Meeting 2: Got there 5 minutes early, so headed to the coffee shop to use the facilities. Ordered a turkey sandwich, ate the filling and left the bread.
Meeting 3: 2-hour meeting with coffee and cookies. Sat as far away as I could from the temptations and drank from my litre-bottle of water.
Pit stop: Starbucks, en route to next meeting. Needed the facilities but ended up ordering a no-syrup vanilla roiboos with soy, and a chocolate croissant because it wasn’t busy and I felt expected to order something. I know, intellectually, that I shouldn’t have ordered the croissant. I can’t explain the emotional trigger, but I do recognize it and usually don’t let it get the better of me; it’s got something to do with having just led a meeting, a sense of “whew, that’s over, I can relax”, and something to do with ... self-reward, maybe? I have tried for a long time to put my finger on it but can’t quite. The croissant was delish, but as soon as I’d finished eating it, I regretted ordering it. I’m not bulimic, but if I were, this would have been a time I would have taken matters into my own hands.
Meeting 4: Coffee meeting, but I kept it simple and ordered a San Pellegrino.
Pit stops: Need to pick up my computer from the repair shop, and en route think to myself that I should get some more protein into me. I go through the McDonald’s drive-through, buy two chicken snack wraps, eat the chicken, and throw out the wrap part. As I eat it, I wonder how many carbs are in the sauce.* Later, I vow to stay away from McDonald’s. Thank goodness there is no food at Best Buy.
Home: The last piece of meatloaf and a few green beans in front of the computer while checking email and waiting for a colleague to come over to work together on a project deadline.
Here’s the kicker, and the part of my relationship to food that trips me up every time: I ate, and it was 10:30 PM. My colleague left, and I had a huge mental exhale. The “go go go go” pace of the day had raised my cumulative anxiety and frustration levels. Frustration at being behind, anxiety about meeting the deadline. And there was a lingering smell of chicken and garlic in the air. I cooked up a stalk of celery, a quarter onion, and some chicken. It may be a low-carb cheat, but it’s still a cheat. I didn’t need it; I ate it because as I was eating, I could feel my frustration level drop. Significantly. It’s a hard one to give up - having a cup of tea doesn’t have the same effect.
Net effect: up 2 lbs, and not drinking enough in combination with forgetting my supplements left me feeling bloated and dehydrated. Ughhh.
* I checked the McDonald’s website, and find that the chicken strip - this is the meat portion! - contains: “Chicken breast filets with rib meat, water, seasoning (salt, sugar, food starch-modified, maltodextrin, spices, dextrose, autolyzed yeast extract, hydrolyzed [corn gluten, soy, wheat gluten] proteins, garlic powder, paprika, chicken fat, chicken broth, natural flavors (plant and animal source), caramel color, polysorbate 80, xanthan gum, onion powder, extractives of paprika), modified potato starch, and sodium phosphates. Prepared with liquid margarine: Liquid soybean oil, water, partially hydrogenated cottonseed and soybean oils, salt, hydrogenated cottonseed oil, soy lecithin, mono- and diglycerides, sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate (preservative), artificial flavor, citric acid, vitamin A palmitate, beta carotene (color). CONTAINS: SOY AND WHEAT.”
Dear Food Diary,
I left the house with good intentions yesterday. I packed a salad with good-for-you dressing and everything. I went to my first appointment, which took longer than anticipated, and then headed for the second thing on my list, a pit stop at Staples for office supplies. While there, I could tell I was getting hungry, having run out of the door with half-a-cup of tea and a slice of low-carb meatloaf in me. So I bought a six-pack of green tea, sweetened with Sucralose, and drank one of those en route to my third stop.
I got to my client’s office just before lunch time, and he offered to discuss business over lunch, but we needed to look at stuff online, so I declined. He ate his sandwich at some point, but I had left my salad in the car and didn’t want to go back for it because we would run short of time to get our work done. As it was, I was wrapping up instructions as I ran out the door to my next appointment. I had a handful of almonds, which I always keep in the trunk. It’s important that I keep them in the trunk, so I don’t keep eating and eating them. I take out six or eight at a time, which is all you’re supposed to need. Hah! It’s good for the crunch factor, but really doesn’t do anything on the hunger side. I could feel my gut clenching as I got to the coffee shop for my next appointment, which was a networking chat with someone I really liked doing business with last year, and wanted to stay connected to. So I ordered a soy latte, and felt myself getting a little nauseous and very thirsty. I asked for water, but got a 6-oz glass, hardly enough to quench my thirst. So back into the car and another green tea into me as I raced off to my fourth stop of the day: the gym.
After a quick calculation, I realized that I should eat something before I started working out, so I took my fat burner and alpha lipoic acid - in retrospect, that was probably not such a good idea to do that on such an empty stomach - and sat at the bus stop outside the gym to eat my salad. About half-way through the salad, I got impatient and just went into the gym to get changed and do at least some of my cardio before my trainer got there. I could tell that the food hadn’t metabolized yet because, despite eating eight green grapes after the salad, I could barely lift some of the weights. That’s not like me. I’m usually gung ho and ready to push myself. As well, dear diary, there was some neanderthal type there, muscular guy with heavy accent, who was obviously not pleased that a mere short, overweight woman was messing up his equipment by changing the weights. He would throw the padding off the Smith machine and onto the floor, and get that look on his face that I recognize on guys who have a strong misogynist streak. To contain my need for revenge, I had to imagine myself pulling weights that ended with him walking by as I pulled, and smacking him in the ribs. I have no patience for that, so why do these people put themselves in my path? Ick, ick, and triple ick.
Anyhow, after finishing off with another 20 minutes of cardio, I headed for the car, still feeling nauseous, perhaps even more so, despite having drunk a litre of water with protein powder mixed in. Another handful of almonds, this time not counting, so I probably had a dozen or so, and a nauseous drive home. When I got in the door, I couldn’t stand it any more, I was shaking and feeling quite icky by this time; I dove for something quick and easy. A roma tomato on matzah - I know, I know, why did I do that to myself? I’d been so good all day - and a half-hour later, a Lactaid followed by a piece of cheese on a cracker size piece of matzah. I stopped after that, and drank a bunch of tea and water to keep myself full. I also buried myself in work, though I couldn’t seem to stay focused. Facebook was about my speed last night.
Net result: down 2 lbs by this morning, so I lost the 1.5 lb of soy-related water and another half-pound. But I never want to do it by messing with my blood sugar like that again.
